The Lord Is Our Salvation [Large Print]: A Lenten Study Based on the Revised Common Lectionary

The Lord Is Our Salvation

Dent

Scriptures for the Church Seasons

Dent 2018

The Lord Is Our Salvation

KATIE Z. DAWSON

A Lenten Study Based on the Revised Common Lectionary

THE LORD IS OUR SALVATION

by Katie Z. Dawson

A Lenten Study Based on the Revised Common Lectionary

Copyright © 2017 by Abingdon Press

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Scripture quotations unless noted otherwise are taken from the Common English Bible, copyright 2011. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations noted NRSV are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, 1989, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org/

Scripture quotations noted KJV are from The Authorized (King James) Version. Rights in the Authorized Version in the United Kingdom are vested in the Crown. Reproduced by permission of the Crown’s patentee, Cambridge University Press.

All readings taken from the Revised Common Lectionary copyright © 1992 Consultation on Common Texts are used by permission. www.commontexts.org

ISBN-13: 9781501847899

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26––10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Contents

Introduction

Keep Me From Drowning

Genesis 9:8-17; 1 Peter 3:18-22; Mark 1:9-15

Trust and Obey

Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16; Romans 4:13-25; Mark 8:31-38

Truth and Carnival Mirrors

Exodus 20:1-17; 1 Corinthians 1:18-25; John 2:13-22

Either/Or

Numbers 21:4-9; Ephesians 2:1-10; John 3:14-21

Outcasts and Outsiders

Jeremiah 31:31-34; Hebrews 5:5-10; John 12:20-33

Justice

Isaiah 50:4-9a; Philippians 2:5-11; Mark 15:1-39 (40-47)

Room at the Table

Acts 10:34-43; 1 Corinthians 15:1-11; Mark 16:1-8

Leader Guide

Introduction

Sometimes, the clearest way to understand salvation is to look at what is broken, dysfunctional, and messed up in our lives.

The reality of hell looks different in every situation. Sometimes it affects our personal lives through addiction and oppression. Sometimes it affects our communities through injustice or tragedy. Sometimes hell’s grasp is subtle, and we deny it’s there. But when we become aware of hellish situations, they can help us to see, in contrast, how God comes to bring salvation; we discover the good news Jesus offers in a particular place or to a particular person. Salvation is not a general theory. We claim that Jesus is the Lord of our salvation and is doing something to transform our lives.

Salvation is God’s deliverance of those in a situation of need . . . resulting in their restoration to wholeness.¹ It is restoration because salvation does not offer something new; it is God’s original intention for creation. In the beginning, the earth was without shape or form, it was dark over the deep sea (Genesis 1:2). God spoke to bring life, light, and truth out of darkness. This intended peace of creation is described by the Hebrew word shalom. The word shalom encompasses God’s desire that we experience wholeness and well-being, safety and protection, peace and love. God’s work of salvation in Jesus Christ rescues us from the hell that has destroyed shalom, so we might live in this peace once more.

We know who God is by what God does. The Scriptures we explore during this season of Lent reveal to us our Lord. Whether it is in the Flood or in Babylon, in the back alleys of Jerusalem or at the ends of the earth, God has acted consistently to bring life out of death, bring light out of darkness, and bring us back into healthy relationship with God and one another. No matter what kind of hell we are facing, the God who created us can redeem us. The cross of Jesus Christ is big enough, wide enough, and powerful enough to save.

However, Christ not only saves us from something; he also saves us for something. To declare Jesus is the Lord of our salvation is to place our life in God’s hands and to accept the covenant of that relationship. It is to trust that Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension will bring light to the darkest corners of our existence. It is to turn away from the hell that is so familiar to embrace a life of shalom we never thought possible.

Do you have faith that God can do that in your life? Are you ready to accept your salvation?

1.From Salvation, in The New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, ed. Katharine Doob Sakenfeld, (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2009), Vol. 5: 45.

Keep Me From Drowning

Scriptures for Lent: The First Sunday

Genesis 9:8-17

1 Peter 3:18-22

Mark 1:9-15

The first time I experienced the power of a flood, I was ten years old. Because my family wasn’t personally affected, I was excited about this once in a lifetime event. I even had a T-shirt that proclaimed, I survived the flood! As we drove through flooded areas, I was awed by the mirrored waters reflecting the sky over fields and roads alike.

Years later, I was a pastor in Marengo, Iowa, along the Iowa River. A levee protected the town, but as rain fell that spring, the waters crept up. Communities surrounding us experienced massive flooding, reaching the tops of bridges, spilling into homes, and bringing life to a standstill. I began to panic. This was not the exciting adventure of my childhood but a horrific experience of loss. Homes and businesses in those nearby communities were gone. Families were stranded. As the waters in my town sat mere inches below the top of the levee, I moved stuff out of the basement, put my cat in my car, and got out of town. All I wanted to do was to be with my husband, and he was helping evacuate a family from a nearby city. My greatest fear was that as bridges closed, I would be stranded on the other side of the river.

It was my first year of ministry, not a full six months into my tenure at this church, and I left its members to fend for themselves. I was young and inexperienced, but looking back, I’m embarrassed by my focus on myself. I was overwhelmed and afraid, and I bailed. Fortunately, the levee held in Marengo that spring. Only basements took in water. For that, I am grateful.

Many things can drown us in life. We can sink in temptation and sin. We can get over our heads in opposition and ridicule as we try to live our faith. We can find ourselves neck deep in the muck and mire of life. So, we cry out for help. But as our readings for this week show, there is someone who hears those cries. And in contrast to my failure as a leader, that someone—our Lord—does not abandon us. Our Lord stays with us, suffers with us and for us, and prepares our deliverance.

THE RAINBOW GENESIS 9:8-17

It doesn’t take very long before everything goes from supremely good (Genesis 1:31) to a big, fat mess. Brothers kill brothers, angels and humans interact inappropriately, and humanity itself is enmeshed in sin and wickedness, immorality and violence. By the time we reach Genesis 6, things are far indeed from the shalom God intended for creation.

As God looks upon creation, only Noah is righteous. God calls him to build a boat. Not just any boat—a ship large enough to hold his family and two of every kind of animal. Shortly after the boat is completed, the skies open up and it begins to rain. The waters sweep every other living thing and person on the earth away. For forty days and forty nights, the rains fall and Noah and those with him on the ark are alone in the world.

God remembers Noah (8:1), and the waters begin to recede. Eventually, the boat settles on dry ground, and Noah and his family come out and give thanks. They had survived, but every living thing that was not on Noah’s ark is now dead. Earth’s population has been wiped out.

We can’t comprehend the devastating force of floodwaters unless we go through them ourselves. As Cedar Rapids, Iowa, began to recover from flooding in 2008, I mucked out homes and walked through neighborhoods, praying with folks who’d lost everything. What remained was under inches of mud and silt. The smell was horrendous. Death and mold and decay were everywhere. Blocks of neighborhoods were still boarded up six and seven years later.

When Noah set up his altar and prayed, he was likely surrounded by bloated animals, dead humans, and muck-covered rocks. As the smoke from the offering rose to heaven, God looked at the destruction and made a promise, which can be paraphrased this way:

Never again will I send a flood to destroy the earth and everything that lives on it. And as a reminder, the rainbow is going to be a sign of that promise, this new covenant. Whenever a storm comes and you see that rainbow, I will remember the promise that I have made to you today.

We may not like this part of the story, where God seems to have a change of mind. God is supposed to be unchanging and not feel regret about the past. But maybe this story isn’t about God changing at all. Many other cultures and religions of the time had their own flood stories: gods sending waters to cover the earth. Many of these tales also have a hero who is warned of the flood and who preserves the heritage of his people. It’s not surprising that our tradition has a flood story, too. What is surprising, in contrast to those tales, is that the biblical account tells us God is merciful. Our God seeks to save, not destroy.

Ash Wednesday reminds us of our sin, our mortality, and our finite natures. We are all sinners. We are all made of the dust of the earth. We can’t save ourselves from drowning in all of that dirt and muck. We might place ourselves in the story and believe we would have been destroyed by the floodwaters.

But our Hebrew ancestors took that familiar story of the flood and retold it with a different ending. Our God made a covenant, a promise, with us. Our God isn’t temperamental or callous. Our God seeks relationship and reconciliation. From the very first chapter of Genesis to the very last chapter of Revelation, the message is the same: God loves us, and despite whatever hell we are drowning in, God wants to save us.

This story of destruction and flooding tells us that God made a covenant with all people through Noah. It’s the promise of a new relationship in a post-Flood world. Even if the ideas of the human mind are evil from their youth (8:21) and we dive headfirst into sin, God will not abandon us or destroy us. God will bring us back to shalom.

In the ancient Near East, the rainbow had been a sign of judgment from the heavens, accompanied by ominous clouds and bolts of lightning shooting forth as arrows to condemn.¹ Yet in this story, as God makes a covenant with all creation, the rainbow itself is transformed. It becomes a symbol of peace and mercy, a symbol of grace even in the midst of judgment.

Rather than gather up wrath and hurl lightning bolts when we do not obey, our Lord sees the rainbow in the sky and looks down upon us without condemnation (9:14-15). Even though we are sinners one and all, God reaches down to us. God, who took a lump of clay and formed us in the divine image, cared for us from the beginning. Our God breathed life itself into us. Our God is merciful and patient.

Though we are drowning in sin, God makes a covenant with Noah to never again cut off all life through floodwaters. In the midst of the death, destruction and loss of the Flood, God blesses Noah’s family and calls its members to create life themselves. They are not pristine human beings; they have faults of their own (as the very next verses after this selection remind us), but they now know that every living creature is under the care of the Lord.

God doesn’t want to destroy us, even if we are unrighteous and full of sin. God desires not the death of a sinner, but a repentant heart. Our Lord has already set in motion plans to deliver us.

Have you ever felt you needed to be righteous to earn your salvation? How does the promise of the rainbow bring comfort?

A BROKEN CROSS 1 PETER 3:18-22

The Scriptures have the ability both to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable—at the same time. To those who are overwhelmed by religious oppression, like people in the churches Peter was encouraging or like Christians in parts of the world where others are hostile to Christianity, the message of First Peter offers hope.

While Christians in certain other nations are threatened, most of us in the Western world are not experiencing the hell of persecution. There may be isolated instances where one is forced to deny one’s faith under threat, but it is not the norm in our part